As is known, the activities of opticians and ophthalmologists typically include assessing the abilities (or inabilities) of a patient's visual system. This is done by inducing specific movements and neurological responses in the patient's eye (and hence in the optic nerve and/or muscles which control eye movements): such stimuli are created by showing the patient target figures of different kinds, which may be static (in time) or dynamically variable.
In particular, some vision tests involve stimulating the patient's eyes through target images which appear three-dimensional: indeed, the purpose of such tests is to induce the neurovisual mechanism of what is known as “stereoscopic vision”, thanks to which the patient's brain processes and perceives a three-dimensional view of a target object which is in fact represented in two dimensions (but with appropriate graphical tricks) on a physical medium: to induce stereoscopic vision, therefore, the patient is made to wear stereoscopic glasses, which stimulate this type of vision.
The test methods (and hence the apparatuses and physical media of the target images) used nowadays have some disadvantages, however: the main disadvantage is the need—just mentioned—to make the patient wear stereoscopic glasses, which often cause discomfort and an unpleasant sensation in particularly susceptible people.
Further, the need to use stereoscopic glasses, which by their very nature must be placed in direct contact with patients, gives rise to considerable complications in terms of operating flexibility (and thus management costs) on account of the need to have glasses of different “sizes” adaptable to different facial features or to clean/disinfect the glasses after each use.
Moreover, it should also be stressed that the data relating to the results of the optical/ophthalmological tests, as performed in current practice, are collected on physical media (typically paper) separate from the devices used to perform the tests: this has considerable logistic disadvantages and increases the workload of the operator/optician who must coordinate the actions involved in the performance of the actual test with the actions required for annotating and classifying the test results (thus increasing the risk of error and creating undesirable work stress, as well as unduly lengthening the total amount of time needed for the test, to the detriment of the patient's conditions).